Hello, everyone. I'm Kimberly Adams. Welcome back to Make Me Smart, where none of us is as smart as all of us.

Today, we're talking about the Federal Reserve's decision this week to cut interest rates by a quarter of a percentage point.

Now, this is the third cut this year, and it comes as the president continues to put pressure

on the supposedly independent agency to move the economy the way he wants, and as some changes

are coming down the pipeline for the Fed's membership. So here to unpack all of this with us as our

resident Fed expert

and my DC Bureau office buddy, Marketplace correspondent Nancy Marshall Genser. Hey, Nancy. Hello.

So yesterday, the Federal Reserve cut interest rates by the quarter of a percentage point, like we said,

but it was a pretty divided decision. Why were the FOMC members, a federal

open market committee, why were they so conflicted? Well, Stephen Myron, who is a Fed governor,

appointed by President Trump on leave from his position as head of the Council of Economic Advisors,

he has been dissenting pretty consistently. He definitely wants lower interest rates,

lower than the quarter percentage point, the Fed cut yesterday. But there's also just a lot of

uncertainty, Kimberly, at the last Fed meeting, Chair Powell described it as driving in the fog.

And he said yesterday that, you know, he really could have made a

case for either lowering more or staying the same just because the economy is so uncertain. There's

just no certain path right now. And there were a couple of other dissents as well, yeah?

Yes, there were. We had two other dissenters, Austin Gouldsby, who is the president of the Chicago Fed.

He dissented.

Also, Jeffrey Schmidt, the head of the Kansas City Fed.

He dissented, but Kimberly, they didn't want lower rates.

They actually wanted rates to stay the same.

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